With everyone waiting for 1.1, and not much else going on, I figured I would start a little economy write up. Though many think that Sins economy is pretty basic, I assure you nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, during my play time I have noted 3 distinct economy paths. That's right, not 1 but 3. I decided to write a little about each in parts. So here we are, I begin with Part 1: The Resource Economy!

Resource Economy

Well, as the name suggests, this economy revolves totally around, you guessed it resources! How can simply focusing on resources give you good economy? I mean everything costs credits right? Well yes it does, but with the great invention that is the Black Market, you can easily convert your resources to credits! In fact give them sell price (without selling to other players) you can argue that each 1.0 per second of resource is equivalent to 2.5 credits a second. Damn that's a lot of credits! Of course no extractor gives you 1.0 credits per second, but even at .66 resource per second, the neutral extractor gives you a nice income of 1.65 credits a second! That is in fact better than an early tradeport, which will get you 1.2-1.4 credits per second due to the short route. And a lot of gravity wells have more than one of these neutral extractors, when you get a storm or gas giant with 3-4 of these bad boys, you can really cash in!

This economy is easiest for Vasari than any other faction. Mainly because not only do you get easy resource extraction upgrades, which are worth it, but you also get to capture the neutrals with a scout. The scout is way cheaper to use than a colony ship, and because of it's speed, it can capture many extractors far from home, crossing many planets full of militia.

Of course targeting only neutral extractors does not always work! With the latest patch, I have seen random maps with 12 easily reachable neutral extractors, and I seen other maps with only 1 on the whole map! Random is in fact very random in-deed. Also many nonrandom maps will not have a lot of neutral extractors! But fear not, you cans till cash in on the resources of planets and asteroids. Because planets have a start up cost (always upgrade them to level 2 of civilian infrastructure at least), you forsake building tradeports so you can colonize more planets. There is also one other thing you can do, which at this point is kind of an exploit, but I think all is fair in love and space-war. You colonize the planet and do not upgrade the civilian infrastructure, this saves you a lot of cash. You the proceed to build extractors, and once they are done, you abandon the planet! The amount of credits you lost while your planet is underdeveloped is not as much as the cost of developing it. And as an added bonus, the extractors at the planet once abandoned will operate at 100% allegiance! This is a bug, or so it is claimed, but I find it a very useful bug! This allows you to get good income from planets in other systems where otherwise they would have a max allegiance of 35%.

Now with this economic model, you can also try to increase your credit income by selling crystal to other players. Not I said crystal, there appears to be a bug, thou I haven't had a chance to confirm it, when selling metal to another player the credits are subtracted instead of added to your treasury. A terrible bug indeed. But people tend to buy crystal over metal anyway.

Well this concludes first part of my series on economy in Sins. Hope you enjoyed, and see you next time!